My holiday project is to play around with a Raspberry Pi and a RTL-2832U DVB-T USB receiver. This specific receiver has a mode where it dumps raw IQ samples over USB to the computer. The gnuradio experimenters realised this and therefore gnuradio supports this relatively cheap off the shelf USB receiver as a software defined radio.

2012-12-06
The Raspberry Pi has a rather tiny ARMv6 CPU running at 800MHz. Doing signal processing on this CPU (as the GPU is still too closed to do it on that), looked impossible to me.

I live in a flat with a prepaid electricity meter. Buying enough electricity is a task I am faced with every month. One advantage of this system is that you can see how your electricity "units" count down, telling you how much electricity you are using.

Together with an LCD showing the amount of units that are left, the electricity meter also has an LED that flashes faster or slower according to your electricity usage. Below this light it says "1000 flashes per kWh". Kilowatt-hour is the technical term for what we call a "unit" of electricity.